Jonathan Demme will always be known for one thing above all others. He is the man who directed Silence of the Lambs. Which, in the world of film, is much like being the guy who wrote The DaVinci Code. It doesn’t really matter what else you’ve done, or if it’s any good, you’re still that guy. And Demme has done some other excellent work, like Adaptation and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. He has also done some great documentaries, mostly music ones, like Stop Making Sense, about the Talking Heads, and Heart of Gold, the recent excellent film about Neil Young. And now, he comes out with this terrific documentary about former president Jimmy Carter, Man From Plains. The movie often makes reference to the fact that Carter is the 39th president. Why are Americans so crazy about the numbers of their presidents? We don’t do that here - it took me a long time to figure out what number Prime Minister Stephen Harper was…then I forgot before I came back to writing this review. All that counting for nothing.
Carter was on The Daily Show last night, promoting his new book about his mom Lillian, “A Remarkable Mother”. And I was so taken with Carter that I immediately watched Man From Plains the next morning. And the first person to appear - is Carter’s mom! On the Johnny Carson show in the late 70s, while her son was president. Her appearance is awesome - such a funny, engaging elderly woman, and it sets the tone for the entire movie. Because Carter is a lot like his mom. He can be funny, he can be entertaining in an elderly, my-grandpa-makes-jokes kind of way, and he is always interesting and very well-informed. The movie moves on right away to a barbecue near his birthplace where he blesses the meal. This is one of the few Christian speakers who actually gets his voice heard while not being a total wing-nut. His blessing is so very American, but good-American. He prays for the soldiers overseas, and prays for the environment, calling the American people “custodians of the land”, and expressing the hope that they all remember this and work together to save it.
Then the film moves on to the meat of the story. Carter’s new book (at the time) was called “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid”. It was a reference to Israel’s policies in Palestine, which are, in many cases, the same as apartheid, and in some cases worse. (Apartheid, by the way, has been defined by the UN in the wake of the human rights battle in South Africa, and Palestine certainly qualifies, but people hate using the word to describe anything other than South Africa itself. It’s would be kind of like people getting angry about the genocide in Rwanda being called a “holocaust”. No, there was only ONE holocaust, and I’m offended!) And the controversy over the title and content of the book is the main theme in the documentary. Carter suggests, early on, that there is absolutely NO degree of objectivity left in the American news media, and watching the film, it seems like a pretty accurate statement.
The basic premise of the book is that in order to broker peace in Israel and Palestine and the Gaza Strip, Israel has to withdraw. They are keeping the Palestinians behind a wall and enacting very apartheid-sounding laws to keep them opressed. So his solution seems, on the surface, to be very simple. Back off. Let the Palestinians have their land. Everyone wins. The controversy arises when the Israelis and their supporters start pointing out the Palestinian acts of terrorism against Israel. If the people in Gaza are walled in, the Hamas supporters can’t walk into Israel and detonate a suicide bomb. So, we keep them in their cage so that innocent Israelis are not killed. Which is an argument that also makes sense. And while Carter decries the terrorism and suicide bombings in his book, he also says that they are not going to stop as long as their people are being, for all intents and purposes, kept in a cage. The attacks on Carter become more and more venomous, accusing him of everything to plagiarism to outright lying, to actual anti-semitism.
Carter makes appearances on lots of shows, being interviewed by Jay Leno, Al Franken, Larry King, and the always-irritating Wolf Blitzer. Callers ask him questions on radio programs, questions that boggle my mind - why were you such a sissy over the Iran hostage affair? Why didn’t you bomb the s*** out of Iran then? Wouldn’t we have a better relationship with Iran today if you had done that? And Carter’s response is remarkably controlled, given the question. Who still thinks this way? Does this caller really think that thirty years from now, the U.S. will have an excellent relationship with Iraq? Because they have destroyed it now? Bonkers. And what’s more bonkers is that you get the sense from peoples’ reactions, that had he come out totally one-sided on the Israel-Palestine issue, and it had been against Palestine, there would have been almost no controversy at all. The U.S. has chosen a side already. It is Israel. And nothing more can be said on the subject. Except, of course, when you are Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter is a wonderful man, a man who may well be doing more for America and the world after his presidency than he did while he was still commander-in-chief. He’s 84 years old, he just celebrated his sixtieth wedding anniversary, and he is still making the rounds of talk shows, doing countless interviews, and working harder than maybe anyone else in the world toward peace in the middle east. And I am going to assume that everyone knows what he has done to help Africa with disease prevention, and what he has done with Habitat For Humanity, building houses for people all over the world. (Although my mom volunteers at Habitat For Humanity, and I’m not sure she knows the exact involvement of Jimmy Carter.) Does anyone remember what Reagan did after he left office? George Bush the first? Gerald Ford? They kind of disappear, rest on their laurels, and barely lift a finger again. Bill Clinton has been working his tail off since he left office, doing dozens of speaking engagements at half a million bucks a pop. Jimmy Carter doesn’t charge for his speaking engagements, and offers to give lectures at universities and hundreds of places across the U.S. And, after this book came out, sometimes he was actually turned down.
In Carter’s administration, he aimed for less dependance on foreign oil. From the time he took office until the time he left, U.S. imports went from 9 million barrels a year to 5 million barrels. The States is now back up to 13 million barrels a year. He suggests in this movie that the Bush government’s policy - which is not to speak to anyone in the world who doesn’t agree completely with the Bush government, is insane. How can you ever see both sides of an issue when you won’t listen to anyone but yourself? And Carter has the credentials to talk. He is the one who did what many thought couldn’t be done in the 70s - brokered actual peace between Israel and Egypt. A peace that lasts to this day. Those peace talks are shown in this film, and Carter’s wife reminisces about that time in some pretty amazing scenes. And the movie closes with Carter, as president, being both right and incredibly forward-thinking about global warming.
The one complaint I have about the movie is the soundtrack. I like it - the songs are good, and interesting, like Djamel Ben Yelles, Alejandro Escovedo, and Neil Young. They certainly fit the tone of the film, but the editing of the soundtrack is intrusive. Rap songs, like one by Brother Ali, play while Carter is on the phone, so it becomes difficult to listen to both at the same time. But it’s a small quibble. Man From Plains is a wonderful film about a wonderful man.